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Like Claude Rains in "Casablanca", I'm shocked, shocked, by the revelation that the de facto leader of a political party attempted to improve his party's prospects for victory in an important election by attempting to avert a potentially damaging intra-party primary.

The "stunning" revelation here is that the party leader, being the president of the United States, was, through third parties, dangling the prospect of a federal job as a consequence of a candidate becoming a non-candidate. We have civil service laws, Senate confirmations, other means of ensuring that hacks and cronies aren't given positions from which their incompetence might do harm to the public good; thus handing out federal plums to unqualified party loyalists is clearly a bad thing.

As it happens, though, the prospective opportunity to affect federal performance was being held out to (a) a member of Congress who was sufficiently competent to have attained the rank of admiral in the United States Navy, and (b) a former very highly respected state legislator who had apparently been sufficiently competent to have been selected by his peers to serve as speaker of the Colorado House. When a candidate for president promises to bring "change" (all do so if they are running to succeed a president of another party), it is presumed that the change they have in mind is to change practices and procedures that are contrary to the public interest. Placing Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff in responsible positions in the federal government hardly fits that description.

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